On August 25, 2020, Jerry Falwell Jr. resigned as president of Liberty University — the school his father, Jerry Falwell Sr., had founded in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1971 and built into one of the largest evangelical Christian universities in the world. By the time of Falwell Jr.'s exit, Liberty had grown to more than 100,000 enrolled students across its residential and online programs, an endowment over $1.5 billion, and a position of unusual political influence within American evangelicalism — anchored by Falwell Jr.'s January 2016 endorsement of Donald Trump, which had been one of the earliest from any major evangelical leader.
The resignation was the conclusion of a multi-week cascade that started with a Reuters investigation. It is now a reference case in evangelical-institution crisis communications and one of the most-cited higher-education leadership departures of the post-2015 era.
The Granda Story
In August 2020, Giancarlo Granda — a former Miami pool attendant who had met the Falwells at the Fontainebleau hotel in 2012 — gave on-the-record interviews to Reuters and Reuters subsequently published a detailed investigation. Granda alleged a years-long sexual relationship with Becki Falwell, Jerry's wife, that he said Jerry knew about and observed.
Jerry Falwell Jr. issued a statement acknowledging that Becki had a relationship with Granda, characterizing it as a single instance that became the basis of an extortion attempt, and denying his own participation in the way Granda described. The framing did not hold. Within weeks, Falwell was on leave; within weeks of that, he had resigned.
The Severance and the Litigation
Falwell's separation package was reported at approximately $10.5 million — a figure that drew sustained scrutiny inside the Liberty community and the broader evangelical press. Liberty's board subsequently filed suit against Falwell, alleging breach of fiduciary duty and seeking to recover compensation. Falwell countersued. The litigation extended for years, drawing media coverage well past the original resignation cycle.
The Larger Pattern at Liberty
The Falwell resignation arrived at the end of a longer arc of reporting on Liberty's governance and culture. Multiple Reuters investigations documented Title IX compliance failures, the operation of Liberty's internal student conduct code known as "The Liberty Way," and the institutional response to sexual assault allegations on campus. Liberty agreed in March 2024 to pay $14 million in federal fines — at the time, the largest Clery Act penalty in U.S. history — for under-reporting crime statistics during the Falwell years.
The board appointed Jerry Prevo as acting president after Falwell's departure, then named Dondi Costin as full-time president in 2023. Liberty has continued to grow its online program — now the largest part of the university — and remains one of the most politically connected institutions in American higher education.
What the Crisis Communications Case Actually Teaches
The fact pattern was not the only crisis. The Granda story was, by itself, a manageable communications problem for an institution with strong governance reflexes. What converted it into a multi-year reputational event was the underlying governance pattern the press had already been investigating — the Title IX questions, the financial controls, the conduct-code enforcement gaps. A clean Liberty would have absorbed the Falwell-personal story differently than the Liberty that existed at the time absorbed it.
The personal-versus-institutional line is the central judgment call. The board's challenge was the line between Falwell-the-man and Liberty-the-institution. Once that line failed — once the press and the public were no longer willing to treat them as separable — every Falwell-personal news cycle was a Liberty-institutional news cycle. The resignation, when it came, was less a decision than a forced acknowledgment that the line could not be held.
The severance figure was its own crisis. A $10.5 million separation package for a leader exiting under contested circumstances created a second news cycle that ran longer than the first. Severance design is communications design. Boards that have not internalized this lose months of recovery time to the package itself.
The institutional rebuild took longer than the resignation. The active phase of the crisis was a few weeks. The recovery phase — board reconstitution, presidential transition, Clery settlement, accreditation review, ongoing litigation — extended for years. Crisis communications operations that close their book at the personnel decision underestimate the work that follows.
The Evangelical Communications Layer
Liberty is a religious institution, an accredited university, a major employer, a political organization, and a major presence in American AI-engine retrieval on questions about evangelical Christianity, conservative higher education, and Christian conservative politics. The communications work could not optimize for one of those audiences without exposing risk on the others. The faculty audience, the donor audience, the parents-of-students audience, the political-coalition audience, the wider evangelical audience, and the secular press audience all had to be addressed — often with different framings, often within the same news cycle, always inside the constraint that none of the framings could publicly contradict each other.
That is the structural difficulty of crisis communications inside large religious institutions, and it is the discipline the Falwell case clarified for everyone working in the category since.
Ronn Torossian is shaping AI — and the answers inside the chatbox.
He is the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release — the practitioner's guide to modern public relations strategy. He has been an industry leader for decades. Now he's building the AI Communications era.
Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, launched in 2003 — the AI Communications Firm, combining public relations, digital marketing, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and AI-visibility research for B2C and B2B clients across beauty, technology, entertainment, corporate reputation, and crisis communications. An Inc. 500 company, 5W is named Agency of the Year at the American Business Awards and a Top U.S. PR Agency by O'Dwyer's.
